Drift
by Ava Blook
Summary: The day Dipper defeats Bill Cipher and saves the world is the day he dies, or so everyone thinks. Years later, his sister Mabel suspects she's being haunted by her brother's ghost. She's only partially right. Will the two ever reconnect, or will Dipper forever be dead to Mabel? Drift AU of the Transcendence AU.
1. Goodbye Forever, Bro-Bro

She'd done the research, on the internet and in the school library's tiny section on the supernatural. All that she'd seen agreed with her initial suspicions. The straightened room, her hair moving even when there was no breeze, the faint scent of pine in her room—it all pointed towards a haunting.

And there was only one person she could think of that would be haunting her.

She gathered the candles and incense like the website had said and lit them, keeping the sage close at hand. The cluster of colorful candles on her desk gave off a cozy glow, and she could smell the cinnamon and vanilla incense working. She shut the lights in the room off and focused on the flickering glow of the candles.

"Bro-bro, I know you're here," she said. It was the first time she'd said it out loud, and the first time she really knew it was true. As much as she hadn't wanted to admit it, Dipper's idiosyncrasies had followed him into the afterlife, and she _knew_ somewhere deep inside her that the ghost haunting her was that of her brother.

That just meant that he deserved to move on, to find peace, even more. Her brother had died years ago, when they were twelve. The thought of the restlessness that he must have felt as a ghost, strong enough to drive him to be able to affect the physical plane, strong enough that it had kept him around even six years after his death, was painful. Mabel couldn't stand to imagine him continuing that way for any longer.

"It's okay, Dipper. Everything is okay. I'm okay. I don't-" her voice broke as she choked back a sob as she thought once more of her brother, alive, and how excited he had been the last time she saw him, right before he died.

"I don't need you to watch out for me. I'm doing fine. You can move on now, okay?"

That was what the website had advised her to say: something to smooth things over, to allow the ghost of her brother to find peace, and to offer him an opportunity to move on.

Just in case, Mabel took the bundle of sage leaves and lit it on the flame of one of the candles. The flame caught, and the sage started to burn, letting off the smoke that Mabel had been assured would help guide ghosts to the afterlife, to peace.

Without warning, a gust of what could almost be wind if there had been a window open in the room pressed against Mabel's face, and every candle, stick of incense, and burning sage leaf was snuffed out at once.

There had been nothing about that on the website, but it _had_ said to expect a sign that the ghost had departed. The wind must have been the sign.

Mabel smiled a bit, sadly. Her brother was really, truly gone now, and she had been the one to make sure of it. Tears leaked down her cheeks as she reached that thought. But now at least his soul was at rest, at peace.

Mabel fumbled for the nearest lamp in the total darkness left without the candles, until her hand felt the pull cord for her desk lamp. She pulled it.

There, on her desk, a tube of cadmium red paint had been opened rather roughly, and paint was spread across her paper desk blotter.

 _Did the wind knock that over?_ she wondered for a moment. She _had_ left it barely closed and precariously balanced on her desk before starting the ritual.

She decided it didn't really matter and ripped off the top sheet of paper, which seemed to be the only one with paint on it. She checked to see if the paint was dripping—it wasn't—and that was when she saw the letters.

An A first, then an I, and then the rest of the letters seemed to become visible as she started looking for them.

I CAN'T, the paper read.

I CAN'T.

* * *

When the haunting had started, Mabel had barely even noticed. It had been maybe a few months into her junior year of high school—emphasis on the maybe, because who knows how many misplaced items had actually been part of the haunting before then?

But she'd settled on December junior year as the time when it started, because that was when she started finding her things straightened, not just missing. The paints on her desk in a row, the watercolor pencils in rainbow order in their box, the crafty knick-knacks on her shelf rearranged into a straight row instead of piles.

It felt oddly familiar, and it took her a few days to realize why. It was the sort of thing Dipper had done, when he was still around. He'd straighten her things while they were talking, or while he was thinking. Mabel had always thought it was oddly funny in an ironic sort of way, since he collected things in odd piles and stacks and his room certainly looked messier than hers, especially when he was working on a project. She'd asked him about it, once, and he'd brushed it off with something about items as similar as different colors of paint being easier to organize.

Of course, Dipper had been dead for years. Her paints had been collecting in piles if they weren't randomly tossed into cute buckets for so long that she couldn't even entirely remember the system Dipper had used until she'd come home after a science test, eager to do a quick vent painting, and found her paints in a neat row in the small top drawer of her desk, in rainbow order no less. She'd thought at first that it must have been her mom tidying up, but neither of her parents mentioned it, or seemed to know what she was talking about when she brought it up. Then she'd overheard them whispering about it one night, worried about her because of it.

That was when she knew something was weird.

It continued in fits and spurts, and she'd come home some days to find her room unchanged, and other days to find her books arranged by topic and not the color of the cover like she'd left them.

That was reasonable enough, she'd thought. Maybe some brownies or something had moved in and started cleaning her things for her.

She left out a dish of milk and a couple Oreos for any possible brownies that night, just in case.

In the morning, they were untouched.

Still, Mabel would find her things straightened for her. And that turned out to just be the beginning.

The ghost started to do other little things Dipper had done that Mabel had almost forgotten about. Setting out two bottles of syrup before anyone else woke up, the way he'd done when they had syrup races. Flipping her hair over her face while she was talking, even when there was no wind. All things that Dipper had done, back when he was still alive.

Still, Mabel didn't want to acknowledge that, barely wanted to acknowledge the ghost at all. Dipper was gone, had been gone for years. Mabel had been able to get through a day without crying for months now, as long as she wasn't directly reminded of him, and the ghost haunting her was providing these reminders everywhere. She couldn't tell, anymore, when she might break down into tears because the ghost had moved Dipper's old hat out of the closet and onto her bedpost, or spread books out on the floor of the guest room that had once been Dipper's.

The day that the ghost had spread the old copies of Dipper's magazines across her floor and connected pages with her knitting yarn, the way Dipper had done when trying to unravel the mysteries of Gravity Falls, she'd started doing the research. This was no way for Dipper to spend his afterlife.

* * *

I CAN'T.

* * *

Of course, the summer they'd spent in Gravity Falls had been what had started it all. While the first half of the summer was more of less a blur of fun and magic, with a few distinct memories like meeting Candy and Grenda and getting Waddles, the second half had been seeped in mysteries and conspiracy, with the ever-present threat of the demon Bill Cipher looming, for a good reason.

The twins had been just a week or two from going home when Dipper had finally uncovered Bill Cipher's plans for the town, the base of the enormous and super-powerful spell he'd been building there, and how he was hours away from fusing the earth with the Mindscape, dissolving society into hopeless chaos and ending life as they'd known it.

And, damn him, Dipper had taken responsibility for stopping Bill.

They'd all helped, of course, with the urgency the situation required, but Dipper had been the most invested. Dipper had been the one to find the counter-spell, to break the ties to the real world that Bill was drawing power from. Dipper had been the one that had approached Bill with the final nullifying spell, the one that would make him powerless forever.

And Mabel had been the one to watch as Dipper's body fell, lifeless, to the ground.

* * *

I CAN'T.

"Can't or won't?" Mabel spit out from sheer habit. Dipper had to be telling the truth, though. The ritual should have guided any ghost possible of moving on into the afterlife. If Dipper was still here, he had to be prevented from moving on somehow . . .

Unless it wasn't Dipper after all.

* * *

 _Supernatural being move item touch organize write invisible_

Not the most eloquent Google search, to be sure, but after dozens of failed attempts, Mabel had given up on coherence in hopes of having enough buzzwords to get a somewhat useful answer.

Pages of results popped up. Poltergeists, brownies, on and on with creatures Mabel had ruled out ages ago.

One result with a page on demons.

She clicked on it, mostly because the school library had almost nothing about demons and so she hadn't done much research on them when she'd been looking into what supernatural phenomenon was happening to her.

It was a simple SuperWiki page on demons that listed the few characteristics that all demons shared, with links to more specific pages.

 _Demons are some of the most powerful and dangerous supernatural creatures in existence. Their volatile and unreliable nature coupled with their power has led to the summoning of demons being banned in several places around the world (see_ _List of Places Where Summoning is Banned_ _for a full list) and shunned almost everywhere else._

 _All demons can be summoned, with specific patterns in a summoning circle and incantations determining which demon answers the summons. Demons can also make deals with people who summon them: promising to do a certain deed with their power in exchange for payment from their summoner, most commonly in the form of live sacrifice, blood, or souls, though some demons associated with the mind or memories place great value in memories or sentimental items(_ _1)_ _._

Mabel swallowed hard. It was about the same as what she'd heard in school, but with even more nasty details thrown in, and so casually. She had to be able to rule out demons as a possibility for the supernatural stuff happening to her, though.

 _Most demons can speak many languages in order to communicate with their summoners, and are superhumanly clever and intelligent if not all-knowing(_ _1)_ _. Demons are experienced at twisting the wording of deals to their favor, allowing them to sow misery and chaos on others, which seems to be one of their main goals_ _(citation needed)_ _by warping their delivery of what their summoner asked for while still technically holding up their end of the bargain(_ _1)_ _._

 _Few demons seem to be able to affect the world in large ways without being summoned, suggesting that summoning lends power to a demon(_ _2)_ _. However, some of the few demons used in organized science so far have reported that they are indeed able to touch and move objects without being summoned, and almost all have been proven to be able to see events happening even when not summoned to them, suggesting they might become invisible and wreak havoc more quietly when not being actively summoned(_ _2)_ _._

 _Research into the limits of demons is inconclusive at best, and may be impossible for some demons, who continually overstep theorized boundaries. At the current point in time, limits must be presumed to vary from demon to demon, and it should never be assumed that a demon cannot exceed their theorized boundaries, especially when summoning or dealing with them._

 _For a full list of demons, with links to pages containing more information, go to_ _List of Known Demons_ _._

She clicked on the link without really thinking about it. The main page had provided so little information that she hadn't been able to rule out demons but couldn't make them a definite possibility either.

Up sprung the list, a couple dozen demons in alphabetical order, with a note that other demons likely existed but hadn't yet been catalogued or recorded well enough to justify their placement in the list.

The page for the first demon on the list, Aeothnar, made Mabel wonder why they had bothered screening demons by the amount of info available. The page was maybe two paragraphs long, with one paragraph being an account of the only recorded summoning of Aeothnar and the other being a summary of information from it. There were two alternate titles for the demon, Tree Watcher and Sky Lord. Not much that could help, though it did seem that Aeothnar's power was less precise than what would be needed to write on a sheet of paper.

She clicked back to the list page and selected the next demon.

 _Alcor_

 _Alternate titles: the Dreambender, Devourer of Souls, the Forgotten One, Lord of the Mindscape_

 _Recorded Summonings: Full list can be found at_ _Known Summonings of Alcor_ _._

 _Known Cults: Full list can be found at_ _Known Cults of Alcor (Current)_ _. Cults that have been disbanded or destroyed can be found at_ _Former Cults of Alcor_ _._

 _Associated Imagery: Blue fire, yellow triangles or stars, black and gold color scheme_

 _Summary: Alcor, commonly addressed with his title of 'the Dreambender' affixed, is a demon that seems to be primarily tied with dreams and the mind, at least in theme. Reports of his powers vary wildly from mild healing or curing chronic nightmares to turning summoners into inanimate objects and controlling fire(_ _1)_ _._

 _Alcor is one of the most powerful and unpredictable demons currently known. His power has attracted the attention of a number of cults, but he has no more than a few dozen dedicated to him at any one time. Most cults who summon him, including his own cults, die or go missing as a result of the summoning(_ _1)_ _. As such, summoning him is strongly advised against._

 _There are few historical records of Alcor originating from the time before the Transcendence, though some vague legends have been tied to him._

 _Powers: Alcor's powers seem to have no or few set restrictions. He is known to commonly wield and control bright blue flames that can be either painless or scorching. He has demonstrated superhuman senses, strength, speed, and agility in dealings with cultists and demon hunters alike(_ _2)_ _, and has such incredibly high pain tolerance that he has been reported to laugh even when attacked with weapons effective against other demons, such as religious paraphernalia._

 _Alcor is also all-knowing, and can see both the future and the past. He knows stunning amounts of information about those who summon him before they even speak, and may also be able to read minds(_ _1)_ _._

 _Alcor's most dangerous power by far is his ability to manipulate reality. He can move or transfigure objects and people without any apparent effort, freezing his summoners in place or making objects fly around the room. He has left written messages, often in blood, in some spaces where he is summoned(_ _1)_ _._

 _Disposition: Alcor's personality and disposition are some of the biggest mysteries still facing researchers today. Reports of summonings have made Alcor out to be anything from friendly and kind to bloodthirsty and deranged, and he is as likely to leave summoners dead as he is to let them live, sometimes regardless of what mood he appears to be in(_ _1)_ _. Current theories suggest a multitude of possibilities, including a number of demons with different dispositions sharing the same name and appearance to give the impression of an emotionally unstable demon, or that Alcor behaves this way on purpose specifically to confuse humans(_ _1)_ _. Alcor's apparent disposition cannot be considered an accurate gauge for how likely he is to cause harm._

* * *

The wiki didn't shy away from details, from a description of the oozing internal organs that made up one demon to a step-by-step guide to another demon's ritual for eating faces. Mabel was vaguely nauseated by the time she'd finished reading the pages for all the demons. She shut the computer down and flopped on to her bed, not bothering to move the stuffed animals she landed on out from under her.

Demons could move things, and would have been able to do the paint-writing trick—at least, some of them could. But there had been no reason why one of them _would_.

A ghost she could understand. She and Dipper were close, and ghosts were known to hang around people or objects they were close to, to reenact their lives. It would have made sense if it was Dipper's ghost, trying to live life with his sister again after dying so young and so suddenly.

But a demon? What reason would a demon have for doing these things? For mimicking Dipper's behavior, for doing things that were undeniably _Dipper_ , not undeniably evil?

It couldn't be a demon, it didn't make sense. There was no motive there, unless some demon thought that deluding her into believing it was her brother was fun enough to be worth the trouble.

So it had to be Dipper's ghost, then. That didn't explain why the sage burning hadn't helped him to the afterlife, though. Maybe he was just a really resilient ghost?

That had to be it.

Probably.

* * *

Mabel woke with a start, still in her clothes, still lying on her bed like she'd been the night before. She hadn't meant to fall asleep.

She rolled out of bed, knocking a few of her stuffed animals to the floor in the process, and tried to blink the sleep-gunk from her eyes. Something about her room looked _different_ , but it was hard to put her finger on it.

She started with the big stuff, and the furniture was all still in place, and the murals and paintings on the walls hadn't changed.

Then she looked a bit harder at her constantly-messy floor.

The candles from the night before had been arranged neatly in a circle, with everything cleared out of the middle of the circle, except Dipper's old pine tree hat, which rested gently in the center.

It had to be some kind of message from Dipper. The hat was important, in some way. It had to be. But how? And what part could it play in helping Dipper move on?

"Bro-bro, what do I need to do with this?" Mabel asked her apparently empty room. Dipper's ghost had been able to write before, and she was sure he'd find a way to answer her now, when it was something so important.

The candles all spontaneously lit themselves, glowing eerily in a circle around the hat.

Ok, so the candles were important, and the hat was important, but how did they relate?

The candle flames burned brighter, and Mabel facepalmed. In her research, she'd learned that sometimes ghosts were tied to objects that had been important to them in life, and Dipper had worn this hat nonstop that final summer. It had been a gift from family, and something he constantly wore, and what else could he have been tied to?

 _The journal,_ she thought _, or_ you _._

She didn't linger on those thoughts. What was important was that Dipper was telling her that he wasn't able to move on because he was tied to an object, and now he was giving her that object and telling her how to destroy it.

 _That means he's okay with it_ , Mabel told herself. _He's ready to move on, but he needs your help._

Mabel reached into the circle, careful not to burn the sleeves of her sweater, and grabbed the hat.

She'd been ready to set her brother's soul free before, so why was she hesitating now? Why were her hands shaking?

Mabel squared her shoulders and lowered her dead brother's hat into the nearest candle flame. The fire caught, and her brother's tether to the world was burning, disappearing into ash. Mabel quickly grabbed a plastic palette board off her desk and put it on the ground under the burning hat to catch the ashes, both so she could dispose of them properly and so the carpet wouldn't catch fire.

As the flames crept towards her fingers, which were gripping the brim tight, she dropped the remainder of the hat to the palette board, where the last of it burned to ash.

"Bye, bro-bro," Mabel whispered.

The candles flickered out, one by one.

* * *

For the next few days, everything was back to the way it had been before the haunting started. Mabel disposed of the hat's ashes in the brook near the house, hoping that Dipper's soul would be swept to the afterlife the same way the ashes of his tether were swept away. Nothing was organized for her. Nothing was moved, period.

She'd done it. Her brother was finally at peace.

At least, that's what she thought until she came home from a movie night with friends to find a note on a piece of her old pig stationery (she'd forgotten she had that until then, actually).

Scrawled on the paper in handwriting that was somehow simultaneously smooth and messy was the question _Do you hate me?_

How could she answer that, when she didn't know who had even written it? Her brother's ghost had moved on, or should have, and he was (she assumed) the only one who'd left messages before. Unless it _had_ all been the work of a demon, misleading her for whatever reason, in which case there was no reason for them to have been banished with the burning of Dipper's hat.

"I don't know who you are to be able to hate you," Mabel whispered.

The lights in the room flickered, and when they turned back on, there was a note scrawled on her desk blotter, the pen used to write it rolling across the desk, uncapped.

 _You used to_

That didn't sound like the kind of thing her brother would say, and Mabel began thinking that maybe it was a demon doing all this to her, maybe her brother had actually moved on when he died.

If it was Dipper, though, it was true in a way. Ghosts didn't change once they died, as far as Mabel knew at least, but she very well could have forgotten enough of her brother alive for him to be a stranger to her dead.

"Then how can I know you again?" Mabel asked.

The lights flickered again, but not for as long, and then there was something new on her desk blotter, scorched into the paper instead of written onto it, an elaborate circle with symbols and runes around the edge, and a star in the middle.

Mabel stumbled backwards. Demon. Definitely demon.

And from what she'd seen in her research, the demon haunting her was none other than Alcor, the Devourer of Souls, Lord of the Nightmare Realm, with over a hundred people dead and a hundred more missing because of him.

Mabel didn't want to be the next one gone. She approached the desk, grabbed the top sheet of the desk blotter, and roughly tore it off, then ripped it in two, breaking the circle. She tore it again, even as the lights flickered and the word _please_ kept flashing into her room, written onto the desk blotter, bleeding from the walls, the backs of her eyelids showing it in negative.

She grabbed a lighter and set the remnants of the circle on fire, throwing them into her metal wastebasket and watching as the word _please_ appeared even in the smoke.

"Never," she hissed out. "I will _never_ be stupid enough to summon you. Stop pretending to be Dipper! Stop messing with me! I will never have anything to do with you, so just _leave me alone_!"

The last of the paper burned away, and everything was quiet.


	2. Mabel, Do You Believe in Transcendence?

**Hello everyone! sorry for the gap between chapters, I've had a lot going on lately!**

 **One note on the formatting - doesn't allow strikethroughs, so I'll be replacing them with [square brackets]. These are meant to look removed or edited out from the rest of the text.**

 **Enjoy!**

* * *

Dipper Pines was twelve years old when he stopped being human.

He was twelve years old when the demon Bill Cipher tried to fuse the Mindscape with the physical world, twelve years old when the two of them got locked into an intense battle waged in Dipper's mind and body, twelve years old when he defeated the demon.

Twelve years old when he became one himself.

Twelve years old when he became invisible, untouchable, nonexistent to his friends, his grunkle, his parents, even his own sister. They didn't know he was there, couldn't see him, couldn't hear him.

He was still there, watching, listening, trying to break through to them, to make contact, but he wasn't powerful enough to make it to the physical plane, where they could see him and hear him. His shouts for attention faded to whispers, and then he finally stopped talking, only using his voice when he was summoned, and only barely even then.

Dipper Pines knew he wasn't human anymore, but he wasn't going to leave his human life behind. He still had to let them know he was alive, still had to talk to Mabel, at least one more time. That one awful day when he'd lost her couldn't be the last time he talked to her.

He was determined to do whatever it took to get back to her.

There were ways for demons to get stronger, he found. Terrible ways, ones that involved bloodshed and soul-stealing and things that human minds couldn't comprehend. Dipper did them, and winced at how much he loved them, and kept his newly-clawed grip tight on whatever was left of his sanity.

 _It's all for Mabel_ , he told himself as he twisted a deal with the Cult of Fallen Branches and tore them to shreds, swallowing their bitter souls whole and feeling his life force strengthen as theirs fizzed out.

 _It's all for Mabel_ , he promised himself as he ripped the demon Elciorin the Slithering in half and devoured his constantly-regenerating form alive.

Destroying all the cultists offering a young girl as sacrifice. Tearing canyons into the Earth to swallow people whole. Making those who summoned him go insane, killing them outright, ripping souls from their bodies for his own use.

 _This is all for Mabel_.

He learned the art of growing distant from himself, separating his mind from the violence and the carnage he wrought in order to grow stronger. He figured out how to ignore the blood, the screaming, the pleads for mercy, how to make his ears grow deaf until everyone but him was dead. There was no getting around it. He _had_ to do these things, forced himself to even as he could feel the cracks in his mind growing and growing. If he didn't, he'd lose his sister all over again.

* * *

He would always return to her, and to the rest of them, to watch them and make sure they were safe, scare what evil he could away from them. Sometimes he could float over Mabel's shoulder, watching her paint or knit or even just think, and forget that anything had changed between the two of them at all.

And then the Cult of Endless Sleep had summoned him just before Mabel had entered her junior year of high school, with twenty cultists offering themselves and their souls as a sacrifice and hundreds more offering their souls for a fraction of his demonic power, and it was _so easy_ to twist their deal, to lose himself in the bloodshed, and it terrified him, how much he was losing himself in the demon instincts that had joined his own. He had to stay sane, had to stay human. For Mabel.

He went back to the house instinctively, his form still spattered with blood, but he was invisible so it didn't matter. Mabel was listening to a playlist of pop songs and knitting a stuffed animal for the local children's hospital.

Just being in the same room as her helped. _This_ was what he was doing everything for: to be a part of this again, to be a part of Mabel's life again.

Idly, he floated over to Mabel's bookshelf and ran his fingers over the spines of her books. A lot of them were about ghosts, now, the afterlife, the newest studies on subjects that hadn't existed half a dozen years ago.

She was trying to find him.

And under Dipper's fingers, the last book on the shelf tipped to the side when he knocked into it.

* * *

He started small, because it was all he could do. He couldn't move things very far or very exactly, yet, but he figured tipping them over and moving them across the room would be enough to get Mabel's attention. But it didn't. It didn't work when he tried it with his parents, either. It was too easy to blame misplaced items on rogue brownies or pixies now, when Mabel even noticed something misplaced within the chaos of her room. There was no way they would realize it was him if he just moved random things.

He'd need to think this through. He'd need to be strategic.

Strategic about knocking over small objects. Ironic, that with all his power, all the destruction he could bring in a summoning, he still wasn't quite strong enough to just make his presence known to his sister, his twin, the Mizar to his Alcor (and oh, how he hoped she wouldn't mind that he'd chosen his new, demonic name because of his relationship to her).

Whatever he ended up doing, it had to be something distinctly _him_ , something she couldn't misattribute to another paranormal force.

Of course, he didn't _do_ anything anymore except slaughter cultists and demons, sacrifices and offerings and innocent bystanders on occasion, and none of that would be recognizable to his sister. He'd have to think back a little—more like a lot, after almost six years of being so far removed from human life.

He'd been neat and tidy, when he still had things to be tidy with. That was a starting place, right? In this mess of a room, Mabel had to notice things getting tidier instead of more chaotic. And he'd used to flip her hair over her face to win arguments, too. She would recognize that, right?

She had to.

She had to know it was him, had to know he was still there, not dead yet.

She just had to.

* * *

I CAN'T

* * *

And of course she didn't get it, because he'd been so _[stupid stupid stupid]_ vague with the clues. And of course she still thought he was dead, she'd seen his body hit the ground, she'd been to the funeral, seen his coffin in the ground covered with dirt. He was _[dead dead dead]_ gone to her. Of course she'd think _ghost_ , of course she'd think he was haunting her, tied to her, dying (ironicly) to move on.

'But

I CAN'T,'

He wanted to say, he did say.

And in the first real, worded conversation he had with his sister in years, he told her nothing of importance at all.

* * *

And still she found the answer of _demon_.

And still she found a Wiki page on him, even if he didn't want her to know everything it had to say.

She was so close, close enough for him to feel her arms around him in a hug—

But she shrugged it off, shied away. She'd set the hat on fire instead of using it as the simplest of symbols for summoning him, and he hadn't expected her to understand right away, but he hadn't expected her to go that far in the other direction, either.

She'd come so close only to dart back even further away than she had been, and it nearly broke him.

* * *

The difficulty in interacting with the physical world came in the finest details, the words, the letters, the handwriting. He was a master of brute force, of violence, but the subtlety was eluding him. It was painstaking to so much as try, and he did nothing but fail, fail, fail trying to write to Mabel again, to try to tell her more like _I'm OK_ or _Not Dead_ or even _[Love You, Miss You, Call Me]_.

 _Do you hate me?_

The words weren't right; too short, not enough, always lacking something he couldn't possibly add to the end with the control he had now, and he didn't have the time to waste waiting waiting waiting to be stronger, to be able to write it all for her at once.

He had to tell her in person, had to get her to summon him. Even with the simplest of circles, the weakest of offerings, she had to be able to see him for a few minutes at least, enough time for him to tell her the basics, to come to peace even if she'd never summon him again.

But she shied away from the circle, swore she'd never summon him, and even if she didn't really know it was _him_ , it _[_ _hurt hurt hurt]_ stung a bit.

Dipper was dead to her, Alcor a threat to her. His sister never wanted to see him again, would never accept it. But he couldn't give up on her, not now, not after all he'd done to get this close.

He'd be a stranger to her, then. He knew he could change his appearance, enough that he didn't still look _[_ _human]_ twelve, enough that he could look like someone else entirely, if he wanted to. He'd clung to his human appearance for some hope at keeping his humanity along with it, but for Mabel, he'd do anything.

So he changed the plan. Wait to be corporeal on his own, wait to be able to change that form. Change it all, everything different, nothing Mabel would recognize. Nothing for her to be scared of, nothing for her to push away from. Unfamiliar, unthreatening. Different.

See Mabel again, have her see him back. Talk. Maybe they could even be friends again, though they'd never be as close as they used to be. She wouldn't know him as a brother, but she'd know him, and that was so much more than he had now.

The plan went up in smoke with Gravity Falls.


	3. Up in Flames

Strange things tended to happen in Gravity Falls, but Henry loved the town all the more for it. He'd come to Gravity Falls expecting weird, after all, and that weirdness had led him to Mabel, the love of his life and now his wife, which more than made up for the gnomes occasionally rooting through the trash or the way town water turned glittery on Thursdays.

Of course, he'd never been expecting the town to get this weird.

Admittedly, this weirdness was the work of people—people in long, hooded cloaks, waving around great flaming boughs of some kind of herb that gave off an odd-smelling smoke. That in itself wasn't too far outside of usual for the town, so no one had really paid them any mind until they'd broken in the window to the town hall and lit the place on fire with one of their flaming branches.

 _That_ had gotten the police on the scene, and the hooded people had offered no resistance as the police began cuffing them.

That was when the first demon had shown up, too.

Turned out the weird plants were Yggdrasil, which Henry vaguely remembered from the demonology class he'd taken in college to meet a requirement. No one was really sure exactly what it did to demons yet, but hell if it didn't pull them in like moths to a lightbulb, then make them even more violent and powerful.

Henry had been in town, walking back from buying groceries when the first flickers of fire started licking at the town hall, and he'd stopped to watch until something purplish, with twisting horns and whipping tails had popped into midair amidst the smoke, and immediately chomped down on the shoulder of the nearest police officer.

He dropped the grocery bag in shock, silently cursing everything as raw egg splattered the sidewalk and he ran to detour a bit further from the town hall through an alley and call Mabel.

"What's up, buttercup?" she asked cheerily.

"Listen, Mabel, there's some stuff going on in town, there's a demon here and—" Henry tripped over a bag of trash lying at the foot of a Dumpster. He could hear Mabel's cry of alarm coming from the phone.

"I'm fine, I just tripped. Listen, I'm on my way home, can you get the car ready? I want to get out of town as soon as we can."

"Yeah, I can do that," Mabel said. "But—you're sure it's a demon?"

"At least one," Henry said. "I should be home in just a couple minutes, if you can—"

This time, he tripped harder. The phone flew out of his hands, and he saw it shatter against the pavement.

" _Shit,_ " he hissed. He could already feel the all-too-familiar sensations from his left leg that meant the bone was broken. He turned to see what has caused him to trip in the first place, and the blood very nearly froze in his veins.

The alley was crawling with neon orange vines, blinking with hundreds of glowing red eyes, and studded with gnashing, shallow teeth. They'd grown up around his ankle, and he could feel them scratching their way up his leg, slowly but surely. Outside of the alley, the fire had spread to another building and turned bright pink, and at least a half-dozen demons peppered the square, tearing the buildings apart, terrifying the people unable to get away.

This was bad. This was _really, really_ bad.

Henry turned to his phone again, hoping the damage wouldn't be as bad as he'd thought, but no, the screen had shattered, wires and circuit boards hanging out the back. And until he let her know otherwise, Mabel would be waiting for him back at the Shack, waiting as the demons drew closer and closer to the outskirts of town as they exhausted the possibilities for havoc at its center.

* * *

Henry had managed to keep the vines from growing any further than his waist, holding them back with the scissors from the Swiss Army knife off his keychain, but they were only getting stronger.

The smoke in the air had grown even stronger, and Henry was pretty sure the fire had spread to another building. Whether it was the wind carrying embers or the work of the demons, however, he was less certain about.

Gravity Falls was used to unicorns and Manotaurs, merfolk and fairies, but not demons. Even if the town had been summoning demons daily, Henry doubted that they would have been ready for this many. He'd managed to flip over and twist around a bit, to see the town square, and had already seen maybe a half-dozen demons pass by. None of them had seemed to notice him, thankfully enough. No, their attention was drawn to more mobile and interesting prey. They went after dogs whose leashes had been dropped in panic and the people left behind in the initial chaos and the bright pink truck driving straight through the city center—

A familiar truck. Mabel's truck.

As it turned out, his wife was definitely not one to sit around and wait. Instead, she plowed straight through a hoard of snake-dogs one of the demons had brought in its wake and threw open the door to scream his name, not sparing a second look at a glowing rainbow cloud blinking thousands of eyes hanging just above her.

"HENRY, YOU DORK, WHERE ARE YOU?" she yelled, and goddammit he loved his wife but now was not the time or place to be drawing that much attention.

"Mabel! I'm here!" he called back, trying to be loud enough for her to hear without alerting any of the demons present. The situation made him nervous, though, and his voice was far too quiet. He cleared his throat to try again, only to watch as a demon that looked like a lime green ball of legs wearing high heels crashed into his wife.

And when Mabel started bleeding, Henry noticed that the high heels were actually knives, now dripping with entirely too much of the love of his life's blood.

The demon flicked out what looked like a scorpion tail but seemed to function like a tongue, licked up some of Mabel's blood, and began spinning into her, whirring a flurry of blades into – and through - her stomach. Mabel was being torn apart, and he could do nothing to stop it.

Well, not nothing.

"HEY!" he screamed, hoping to get the demon's attention. It seemed to work, and the demon stopped halfway through dragging its blades through his wife.

Unfortunately, it's attention was now on Henry. It began to float towards him, and now he could see what distance had obscured: the unblinking eyes on the tip of every heel, pitch black but undeniably _watching him_.

Or it was for a moment at least. The air in the town seemed to shift, feeling even more sinister than it had before. The leg-demon froze in its tracks before disappearing in a puff of yellow powder that smelled like dirty feet.

The immediate threat gone, Henry twisted himself to see what he could of Mabel. The vines had grown further up his body while he'd been preoccupied, and his arms were now out of his control too.

Mabel was barely conscious, her head lolling a bit as her chest struggled to move with every breath. The blood was still pulsing from her wounds, and Henry was seeing parts of his wife he'd never wanted to see—exposed muscle, guts, bone.

In an instant, it struck Henry that Mabel was going to die.

While his brain was still trying to process the information, though, the situation in front of him was already changing, as a figure that looked almost human entered his field of view.

Key word being _almost_.

The new figure could have been a human wearing a suit, except that it was a uniform black darker than Henry had ever seen from head to toe, with lines of glowing gold so bright they hurt to look at cracking through the blackness. It was floating a good foot off the ground, and had wings coming off its lower back, and its top hat was floating, too, so really 'almost human' wasn't accurate for more than the shape.

No, the figure in front of him, drifting ever-closer to Mabel as she bled out, was Alcor the Dreambender, Lord of Nightmares, Devourer of Souls, Scourge of Worshippers, and a hundred other titles the news used whenever he was summoned and slaughtered a few dozen people – after tricking them out of their souls. Cruel, merciless, torture-loving, one of the most powerful demons and always getting stronger, and he seemed to be drawn to Mabel, of all people.

For an instant Henry wished she would bleed out before he could reach her, to be spared his brand of cruelty at least. But no, he scooped her head and shoulders up almost gently, and her eyes flickered open.

Alcor was talking to Mabel now. His voice was soft, and Henry couldn't make out the words, but he knew it. Henry tried to cry out, to break Mabel's concentration, but the vines had gotten to his face, his mouth, and the noise he could make was too muffled to do her any good.

The demon offered Mabel a hand wreathed in blue flames.

And Mabel shook it.

* * *

Henry had been expecting torture. A long, slow, bloody death – well, more so than bleeding out from a marred abdomen would have been in the first place. He'd thought he would have to watch as the demon swallowed Mabel's soul – or Mabel herself – greedily before turning to look for more prey.

Alcor did pull Mabel's soul from her body – or at least, Henry assumed it was her soul: a bright pink ball of energy, its glow dimming a bit as it was pulled free of its host. The demon raised it to his lips, and Henry felt tears leaking through his eyes as he couldn't help but watch what he was sure would be his wife's last moments.

But instead of swallowing the soul, the demon gave it a gentle kiss, and then tucked it back into Mabel's body. The glow got exponentially brighter, as Mabel's wounds started to glow with magic –

And then she was gone. Only Alcor was left, sitting amidst the wreckage of the other demons.

The demon turned his head, and Henry could feel Alcor's eyes on him, their gaze burning. He expected to be next, to be tortured, torn apart.

Instead, the vines around his body disappeared in a puff of smoke. Alcor looked rather pointedly towards the Shack, and then vanished himself.

There was no time for guesses or playing around. That look towards the Shack had to be a clue, or as much of one as he would get from a demon. He needed to find Mabel, to make sure she was safe, and that would be the best place to look.

He drew himself up on shaking limbs, clinging to the wall of the alley for support. His broken left leg would have collapsed under him, if he hadn't had practice walking with a broken shin before. Thank God it wasn't his driving leg – Mabel's truck was still here, and it was his best bet of getting back to the Shack.

Henry staggered his way out into the into the town center, barely noticing that the demons had all scattered, most of the weirdness they had brought gone with them, and that the fires had gone out. His focus was entirely on the door handle of the truck, pulling it open, turning the keys, and getting the car driving.

He cut a sharp U-turn, smashing into a mailbox as he drove without the focus or patience for his normal precision and care. The truck was a brick anyway, and Mabel wouldn't care about a few scratches in the paint.

The roads, or what was left of them, were hell. Potholes had deepened to pits, the shoulder of the road seemed to be struggling to lift its new arm from beneath the ground, and in some places the road wasn't even visible under the debris the demons had left - if it was even still there. Henry plowed through it all as best as he could, steering around the very worst and thanking God all the while that Mabel had chosen such a sturdy truck to bedazzle. He had to get home, to get back to her, and there was no way the type of 'practical' 4-door he'd practically begged her to get would be able to carve its way through this mess.

As it was, the truck was having trouble, but it managed to struggle its way up the road to the Shack. Henry shifted it into park a bit closer to the Shack than he should have, but couldn't bring himself to care, or even to pull the keys from the ignition. He threw open the door of the truck and stumbled out, almost faceplanting on the loose gravel of the parking lot.

He couldn't move fast enough, each step was too small, each foot closer he was to the front door didn't go by fast enough. After what felt like ages, he finally pushed the front door—thankfully unlocked—open and rushed inside.

The gift shop was empty of people, customers and employees alike. Henry staggered through it and pushed past the Employees Only door, into the living room. Stan was passed out on the recliner, the Black-and-White Period Piece Old Lady Boring Movie channel flickering from the TV. Henry could worry about telling Stan later, and instead made for the stairs.

He checked every room. Stan's bedroom, empty. Ford's bedroom, empty. Closets, bathrooms, all empty.

The last place he checked was the attic. The open room at the top of the stairs was empty, and that left only the attic bedroom, which was Mabel's (and now his, he had to start remembering).

He pushed open the door to find Mabel on the bed, eyes closed and a blissful smile on her face. He crept closer, and saw that the wounds from her abdomen were gone. Waited a few seconds, and – there! – she was breathing, slowly but surely. Asleep. Safe. Alive.

With his immediate concerns for Mabel's safety now resolved, Henry finally realized the pain coming from his broken leg, and sunk to the ground hard and fast to take his weight off of it. He felt tears at the corners of his eyes, and he couldn't even pick one cause for them; worry for Mabel, relief she was safe, both could have been the reason (or it could have been the pain in his leg, but Henry didn't care so much about that now).

Still, even though Mabel looked fine, there was no telling what Alcor had done to her, what kind of deal he'd coerced her into (-as she lay bleeding out on the pavement while Henry was helpless to do more but watch-).

Demons didn't make deals unless they got something from them, and anything a demon could get from this kind of deal was bound to be nasty. Mabel may have escaped the immediate danger, but there was no telling what they'd have to worry about from now on.

Henry wasn't exactly an expert in demons, much less in trying to protect his wife from them. No, that was the specialty of another person he knew . . .

Henry scrabbled with the landline on the table near the door, practically an antique but something Ford had insisted on keeping (said he didn't trust cell phones, and after what had happened today, Henry would never again make fun of him for ensuring they had a backup phone around). He punched in the number from memory, and listened nervously to the phone on the other end ring until it was finally picked up.

"Wendy!" Henry said. "How soon can you get to Gravity Falls?"


End file.
